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Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products. They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing

• ikiris 2mo ago
  Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is the specialty of product managers.
• ngrilly 2mo ago
  Also a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but their stubbornness in artificially splitting their consumer and enterprise products is extremely annoying. It's pretty weird that I have access to more powerful tools when using my personal Google account compared to my corporate Google Workspace account.
  • vel0city 2mo ago
    As someone who's been using Workspace as a personal email account for over a decade this has been such a struggle forever. Just lots of odd limitations to feature sets all over the place. When they swapped Google Assistant for Gemini as the default voice provider in Android Auto it was so annoying. My wife's non-work space account can get Gemini to do the normal things like play music and what not, but my Workspace one can't do much of anything at all. I can talk about nearly any random topic with it, but getting it to change the playlist, nah, can't help you there. It's no surprise to me to see them fumble actually supporting a lot of the consumer features of Gemini into Workspace.
    • rapind 2mo ago
      The entire Google Workspace division is basically Microsoft. I assume they are making a lot of money in order to support their continued disfunction.
    • ngrilly 2mo ago
      I'm in the same situation. But I was shocked discovering it goes both ways: many new Gemini functionalities are only accessible using a consumer account instead of a Workspace account. Also, Gemini is now the only major AI assistant with no support for MCP connectors. Instead of adding this to the core product, like ChatGPT and Claude did, somebody at Google decided that it was smarter to add this fundamental feature to a new product instead: for enterprises this is Gemini Enterprise (which is a product completely different from the Gemini app); for consumers this the new Gemini Spark agent (meaning that you can use MCP within Spark but not within a "non-agentic" chat)... It's clear to me this a symptom of Google shipping their org chart, which is a disaster from a product perspective.
      • londons_explore 2mo ago
        i think Google would see more success if they kept the CEO and everyone at the bottom (ie. doesn't manage anyone), and fired everyone else. Build a whole new management tree - the current people all do a terrible job.
        • allarm 2mo ago
          I think almost every company would benefit from that.
      • rescbr 2mo ago
        I currently have a free trial AI Pro subscription that will run out next month. If it weren't for the $10 GCP credit, I'd straight away cancel it. I don't see enough value in Gemini to justify the $20 subscription.
        • cheesecakegood 2mo ago
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • deaux 2mo ago
    It's literally the meme of the MS org chart pointing guns at each other. The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package. It's no wonder Meta has shit the bed even worse. It's also why Google still releases actually decent, useful models despite the product being such a hilarious mess. A lot of the time Gemini models have actually been better as production LLMs as part of LLM-based production applications than OpenAI and Anthropic models when it comes to the complete cost:quality:latency:adherence picture. And they still are. We have products in prod that use Gemini because they're better than any other model at the specific task. But we wouldn't dare use it for anything coding related, or even just as productivity tool to rely on, because as a consumer product it's a joke.
    • visarga 2mo ago
      > The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package. I got a Google One plan for Gemini, but it came bundled with YT Premium lite, and that somehow made it impossible to renew YT Premium for 30 days. I suspect different teams stealing customers from each other.
      • SXX 2mo ago
        Google also gave away 1 year Gemini plans with Pixel phones that either did not work at all for existing Google One users or messed up subscriptions by downgrading your account to worse plan, or making your existing paid time shorter if you been on cheaper plan or recently changee countries. Etc. Like when you try to give Google money they try to squeeze you as much as possible. At the same time you can get 5 time more limits for free just by registering 10 free Google accounts. Google subscriptions are one big mess.
    • urbsgpw 2mo ago
      Exactly my experience. I'm building an AI document-extraction platform, so I had to benchmark a bunch of models — on the cost:quality:latency:adherence picture, flash wins hands down for structured extraction. (Caveat: I've only tested the three US labs and Mistral.). So like u said, totally viable in prod for a relatively static tool. Didn't build the tool suite with gemini, but if you use service mode it currently mainly runs on flash. Haven't done any serious coding work with the flash models though — but I'm seeing more and more HN comments from people who seem to have picked it up for that in the last couple of months.
  • scrollop 2mo ago
    Apparently you cannot turn off using your data as training data with gemini. This is in line with Google's general privacy policies and it's seeming need to create a stasi file on every human.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • cherryteastain 2mo ago
      You can turn it off but it's an all or nothing switch, if you turn it off everything will basically become a temporary chat and all past chats are deleted
• reaperducer 2mo ago
  They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up That sounds awful. For those of us who don't follow the AI hype cycle, what does that have to do with the topic of this thread: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber?
  • browningstreet 2mo ago
    From the posted link: "3.6 Flash: Our workhorse model that delivers better coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance." What is Google's recently released AI coding product?
  • da_chicken 2mo ago
    That's kinda like asking why someone might complain about Chrome's memory usage in a thread about a new version of V8.
  • logicchains 2mo ago
    You don't see what Google phasing out an AI product subscription has to do with a Google AI product release?
  • zhengyi13 2mo ago
    "Your new models are great, but uh... How exactly am I supposed to use them?" That is, given a lot of users' contexts, the way they can and the way they want to use these models are increasingly disjoint.
• ralusek 2mo ago
  It's funny that they triggered the infamous "Code Red" moment in OpenAI when the 3-3.1 models came out. I switched to using them for a lot of single-shot LLM calls because they were fast and cheap. Their only area that they were lacking in was agentic/tool calling. Needless to say 3.5 was a disappointment. Curious to see 3.6.
• xnx 2mo ago
  > Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success This is still very early days. Who is "on top" has flipped back and forth many times already. The next frontier model release (from whomever) will change things again.
  • onion2k 2mo ago
    I don't think that's true if the reason a company has left the vendor for given model by making it hard to buy. Enterprise IT is enough of a pain in the butt that people will forego the new shiny to avoid the old painful unless it's genuinely better. As you say though, the best frontier model flips regularly, so companies won't go through the hassle of deploying a model if it's proved horrible to do in the past. They'll just skip that model because their current one is fine.
  • Eridrus 2mo ago
    I don't think it's that early tbh, agentic coding has ~90% adoption in the US. Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out. The benchmarks change, but almost nobody opts to use anything other than Claude IME when I ask them. Enterprise is more competitive since they care about costs and other things, but developers leaning towards Claude puts a thumb on the scales there. The product doesn't have much lock in, so it is possible to dislodge Claude, and Anthropic could (and some may argue is likely to) just shoot themselves in the foot again and again and again, but Google has never been particularly good at enterprise sales, and they have never actually been at the frontier of intelligence. I think Google's incentives have mostly about building models for their products, which makes them focus more on the cheap end, and while they need that, it feels like the Innovator's Dilemma is biting them here. I own a lot of Google stock from working there in the past and have been quite happy about their trajectory up until the last 6 months, but I am getting pretty antsy about their AI story these days.
    • sdesol 2mo ago
      > Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out. Claude Code's success is not due to the agent but because the model is considered the best for programming and is very heavily subsidized, compared to pay as you go API prices. Consumers and Enterprise are not really locked in and will go where it makes the most sense. I think they have almost no loyalty by actual developers.
• GodelNumbering 2mo ago
  > I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions. Likewise. This seems like a common feel. I have at least spent $4000 and likely a lot more on Gemini API because I really wanted them to win. I gave up.
  • furkansahin 2mo ago
    I am going to ask a very direct question and only because I am curious. Why do you care? Why would you spend your own money to a multi trillion dollar company so that they win their own "war" against another multi trillion dollar company? Please don't get me wrong, I know the question can seem a bit negative, I am really just curious.
    • GodelNumbering 2mo ago
      No, it's a fair question. The answer: I believe(d) in Demis Hassabis's vision of AI Although, I think saying 'wanted them to win' was not accurate. More like, I stuck with them hoping it will get better, and it did get better in many ways, coding was not one of them.
      • urbsgpw 2mo ago
        This was exactly my thought process. Coupled with a less idealistic one: mid 2025 if you looked arena ELO scores google seemed to be dominating and I was sure the trend would continue. But they really dropped the ball on coding and tool use. That being said, controlling android and apple mobile devices is kind of a big deal. And their video models are still top notch.
• repeekad 2mo ago
  Aren’t the subscriptions extremely subsidized and burning cash for Anthropic and OpenAI? A reasonable explanation is they’re simply abstaining from the war of attrition, especially given cheaper comparable models are breaking the illusion that the “frontier of intelligence” has any kind of per token margin.
  • lerchmo 2mo ago
    Makes sense, subsidizing tokens doesn’t seem like a great strategy for a public company.
    • xnx 2mo ago
      And Google alway has a target on its back for antitrust (regardless of claim validity)
  • Certhas 2mo ago
    This is hotly debated and completely unclear. Let's say Anthropics Opus models cost the same to serve as GLM 5.2. GLM 5.2 is 4.4$/MTok while Opus is 5.6 times more expensive. Assume that GLM 5.2 is served at essentially zero margin. Then Anthropic has >80% margin on API pricing. So even if an average person with a subscription pays only 20% of the API price of their usage, Anthropic makes money on subscriptions. And the real numbers could be better for Anthropic. It's feasible Opus models are actually cheaper to serve than GLM 5.2 because Anthropic have optimized the hell out of inference.
    • repeekad 2mo ago
      Sure, but then why wouldn’t I use GLM 5.2 at cost or K3? I guess that’s the big question, will people pay a big margin long term to use their end products / models or will AI tokens be commoditized by many competing players. For coding if I had to pay API costs I’d switch in a heartbeat, enterprise maybe more reluctant?
      • satvikpendem 2mo ago
• deanc 2mo ago
  It's absolute insanity. They have all the resources to have been able to lead from the front with this new technology. They have the products and users to integrate this technology into people's already existing lives. But they keep fumbling. They're not even benchmarking against other models now, just against themselves - which tells you everything you need to know.
  • msabalau 2mo ago
    What does "leading from the front" get them? There is absolutely no loyalty when it comes to coding. Nothing could be more common than people threating to jump ship whenever another frontier or open source model comes. Google is clearly able to keep growing their free and consumer and small business use cases. Unlike corporate coding, we actually have evidence that solo and small businesses can actually see productivity gains. Anthropic and OpenAI need to stay dancing like mad, because it's their source revenue which underpins their investments. Why does Google need to shove something at the top at the same desperate cadence? Other than "recursive self improvement leads to AGI" it seems perfectly fine if they push out something dramatically better every year and half.
    • sarjann 2mo ago
      Unfortunately them giving up coding means they have less traces to train on.
  • LogicFailsMe 2mo ago
    They simply don't have the leadership to lead. And it starts from the top.
  • asdfman123 2mo ago
    Google promotes people based on shipping features, not making good software. So this breakage means someone is shipping features. You should be happy for them.
• SkitterKherpi 2mo ago
  They'll probably be back later. It's very possible they are "saving up" for a much bigger run.
  • bdcravens 2mo ago
    More likely an acquisition.
• notatoad 2mo ago
  i've got to wonder how much of this is intentional, and how much of this is just google being their usual terrible selves at anything consumer-product related. Google's biggest and most important customer for all this AI stuff is google. Do they actually want other customers, or is having other people use their AI just an annoyance at this point, where we use up compute that they'd rather use internally...
  • wolvesechoes 2mo ago
    > google being their usual terrible selves at anything consumer-product related And yet millions of people around the world are using their stuff, very often using only their stuff.
• nxdmum 2mo ago
  Google Gemini agy is not allowing you to use your token via your own harness. My own harness is far more efficient than agy. They can take a simple stance - if you exceed your token limit they block you - with the 5 hr limit they are already doing this . so there should be no reason to block you from using your own harness - if you are more efficient - you gain - if you are less you lose . They are not allowing me to hit their endpoints which agy hits - it's frustrating . i tried to hack it with gemini itself. what i love about gemini is it's so encouraging and ready to help you - even against the agy client : ) . Even though im so frustrated with this - i still love Gemini for some reason ! Most encouraging model in the world!
• dainiusse 2mo ago
  +1 same way vscode killed its usage base and gave it to its fork - cursor
• epolanski 2mo ago
  > Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products. HN lives in a bubble. I have German/Italian/Polish clients virtually all use Gemini and NotebookLM. Talking insurance, banking, consulting, legal. The real world doesn't look at pointless benchmarks on writing react tailwind crap, they are already google suite users, get the tools, test them and adopt them, end of story. It's going to be like with angular, never mentioned on the net, widely used in the real world.
  • LUmBULtERA 2mo ago
    I have friends and family who use Gemini, but entirely because their Pixel phones came with a year of it for free. No other reason, and they will most likely never pay for it.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  • wolvesechoes 2mo ago
    Yup, it is often mind-boggling how people here are detached from reality. Millions of people around the world rely on Google services, Gemini in all probability is the most used model consumer-wise, Google receives unimaginable stream of data on even smallest habits common people have etc. But hey, Gemini makes shittier job than Fable at producing my shitty "app" no one cares about. It is so over for Google!
• ur-whale 2mo ago
  > they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions This is what happens when you put a McKinsey consultant in the role of CEO of an organization where product managers run the asylum instead of engineers.
• giancarlostoro 2mo ago
  I trust Google to: * Abruptly ban me and all users from a Google Workspace for no reason whatsoever. * Abruptly shut down a service. I'll never give Google my direct money.
  • throwuxiytayq 2mo ago
    Life gets simpler and better as soon as you stop giving money to Google. It’s so silly that individual people still use their shit. Corporations, I understand - they always choose the most mediocre stacks and tools by default. But why people choose to bring the mediocrity of Google into their lives is beyond me.
    • wolvesechoes 2mo ago
      > But why people choose to bring the mediocrity of Google into their lives is beyond me. Because life gets simpler and better if you are just using what is available on your phone and in your browser instead of constantly chasing current HN darling.
      • throwuxiytayq 2mo ago
        That’s one braindead strawman. There’s millions of apps to choose from on your phone. Alternatives to Google are decades old. But do enjoy getting your ass profiled in gmail and let me know if the ads in your mailbox are helpfully tailored to your needs and preferences!
        • wolvesechoes 2mo ago
          > There’s millions of apps to choose from on your phone And choosing one of them obviously makes life more complicated than not doing that. > getting your ass profiled Gmail knows nothing of my ass. > let me know if the ads in your mailbox are helpfully tailored to your needs and preferences! I couldn't, for I don't check them. I have enough life to live without degoogling crusade.
• redml 2mo ago
  I don't know where you've been for the last decade but all google ever does is retire products with no recourse.